Filter and Weasel Words

I learned new terms today: fil­ter words and weasel words. In short:

  • Fil­ter get in the way of prose and dis­tance the read­er from the action. They make it easy for the writer to tell the read­er what’s going on instead of show­ing them. “The dog seemed agi­tat­ed wait­ing for her own­er,” instead of “The dog paced in front of the bay win­dows wait­ing for her own­er.” “The pret­ty girl looked unin­ter­est­ed in the guy ask­ing for her num­ber,” instead of “The pret­ty girl ignored the guy ask­ing for her number.”
  • Weasel words leave text feel­ing ambigu­ous. “He might be the hero’s broth­er.” “The body may have been stolen.” “The dog could have eat­en the roast.” These sen­tences don’t help tell the sto­ry because the weasel words (in bold) ren­der the text mean­ing­less. “He might be unre­lat­ed to the hero.” “The body may be right where we left it.” “The dog could have ignored the roast and slept.”

Remov­ing these cleans up the prose and makes it more inter­est­ing. A post on Scri­bophile sug­gest­ed writ­ing a macro in Word to detect these words and flag them but, since I don’t use Word, that doesn’t help me. Instead I imple­ment­ed the same func­tion­al­i­ty in sh. 

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